All American Girl (novel)

Plot summary

The story is about a girl named Samantha Madison who lives in Washington, D.C. She is a sophomore at John Adams Preparatory School. An outcast, she has only one friend, Catherine. Sam is a huge fan of Gwen Stefani and often laments that she is not more like Gwen. Unlike Meg Cabot’s Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries, Sam is against popular culture and dyes her entire wardrobe black because she is “mourning for her generation.” Sam is a natural redhead and the middle child. She often feels inferior because her older sister, Lucy, is a cheerleader, and therefore one of the most popular girls in school, and her younger sister, Rebecca, is so intelligent that she takes college-level classes at a school for gifted kids. Sam is very different from her conservative parents—her father is an international economist at the World Bank and her mother is an environmental lawyer. Sam also believes she is in love with Lucy’s boyfriend Jack. Jack is the complete social opposite of big sister Lucy, having an artistic yet rebellious attitude to life claiming that teenagers need to fight the system.

Sam is an aspiring artist and draws celebrity portraits during her German class which she has a C- in. Her sister Lucy comes across these portraits and shows them to the family at dinner. As a punishment, her parents decide to enroll her in bi-weekly art classes at Susan Boone's. Sam goes to her first class where she is reprimanded by Boone for drawing what she knows and not what she sees. Offended, Sam decides to skip the next class choosing to occupy her time at Capitol Cookie and Static (a record store). While she is waiting for her housekeeper to pick up from art class, she notices a man she saw earlier at Static who was listening to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". The man turns out to be an assassin and as he takes a gun to shoot the President who is exiting the nearby Capitol Cookie, Sam jumps on him, sending his shot up into outer space. She breaks her arm in the process as the man falls on top of her when she jumps on him.

For saving the President's life, Sam becomes a celebrity and is a national hero. She is also appointed Teen Ambassador to the United Nations. She is no longer a social outcast and becomes popular at school where she receives numerous social invitations and even gets sucked up to by Kris Parks, her nemesis. When she meets the President, she also meets his son who turns out to be David from her art class at Susan Boone's. As she gets closer to David, she deals with her conflicting feelings for Jack—who she thought was her soulmate—and the President's son.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

There was no film to be based on the book, the controversy about the movie had started when the page "All-American Girl" was mistakenly posted in IMDb, which listed the cast " Raven-Symoné as Samantha and Nathan Sykes as David".